John Woo’s “The Killer” Gets the 3D Remake Treatment

The Killer is not only one of the best movies to come out of Hong Kong, but it’s also massively influential: action films from Desperado to The Matrix have paid homage to John Woo’s balletic style, and the epic gun battles (including the excellent final standoff) have gone down in action movie history as some of the best ever captured on film.

It’s with a heavy heart that I bring you the news of the day: The Killeris being remade for American audiences – and to add insult to injury, it’ll appear in glorious 3D. One of the unfortunate truths of the movie business is that the general public – for whatever reason (laziness, apathy, illiteracy, etc.) – will very rarely tolerate a film with subtitles. So movie studios, always tasked with creating new projects, eschew any new ideas and go for easy remakes of successful foreign films. It seems The Killer is the latest movie that has fallen into this trap, even though the original film was first released back in 1989. It’s taken them this long, but the long arm of Hollywood is inescapable.

Interestingly enough, this isn’t the first time a remake of this movie has been attempted. In the early 1990s, a version of the script went around Hollywood set to star Richard Gere and Denzel Washington, but after fearing American audiences would interpret the relationship between the main characters as homoerotic, the version was scrapped. A suggestion to replace the police chief with actress Michelle Yeoh (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) to rectify any possible misreading of the movie proved futile.

John Woo is on board as a producer on the project, and will oversee the direction of John H. Lee (A Moment to Remember, Saying Good-bye, Oneday). The film will star Jung Woo-Sung (from the awesome The Good, The Bad, The Weird), and though he was pretty fantastic in that film, that news isn’t enough to get me excited about this project. What do you think? Have you seen The Killer? What are your thoughts on a remake?

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